


Sephiroth Week 2019

by Illusioneery (Arkee)



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, Implied/Mentioned Human Experimentation, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Shapeshifting, Temporary Blindness, Time Loop, vague fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2020-12-31 20:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21151634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arkee/pseuds/Illusioneery
Summary: A collection of ficlets for the 2019 SephWeek.





	1. Innocence

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, hello! Another year, another SephWeek, so here we go.
> 
> I don't quite know how to classify this? It's quite vague, so I'm calling it a Vague Fic. I also don't know where I'm going with it! Yay! I think I'll just follow it's flow.
> 
> I hope it's enjoyable, anyway :'3

He had never met another kid before.

Maybe he was never supposed to do that for as long as he was there, as he doubted the good doctor would host that kind of meeting in the middle of a random corridor, if it was an intentional thing. And he wasn’t supposed to be there either; wandering instead of going back to his quarters and running into… a random little girl of all things.

So, given the unexpectedness of the situation and his complete lack of protocol for dealing with other children, Sephiroth just stared at her for a very long while; taking in the way she was much smaller than him and her big, bright eyes. Green, but unlike his; a little more similar to what most people’s eyes looked like, though not quite.

She didn’t have a protocol, it seemed. Not that she needed one, at all.

“You’re a kid, too! A big one!” She just exclaimed.

No pointing out his unusual hair color or his strange eyes. No avoiding him or treating him like the test animals and monsters they kept in the lab, like the people down there usually did.

That was a first.

A first he had no protocol to deal with.

* * *

At that point in time, there were few things that truly infuriated him. After all, Sephiroth had been taught the hard way that getting infuriated and showing out that kind of emotion always resulted in more needles, more experiments, more tests that only ended when he couldn’t stand any longer and the sort of yelling that would ring in his ears for hours.

But there was something very infuriating, definitely frustrating, about how much Aerith — as he learned her name was when he got to meet her again — knew that he didn’t, that he was never taught by anyone. Things that seemed so basic when she told him about them, so casually, too.

She wasn’t even being trained to fight and didn’t know much about the revolting things that happened there; the ones Sephiroth wouldn’t say a word about.

(Pretty much the kind of person Hojo would order him to kill in order to test his abilities, despite her age.)

When asked why she knew those things, she simply said her mom told her.

“What’s a ‘mom’?” He asked quietly, just in case the sound he heard just then was that of a guard looking for either of them.

“You don’t know?”

He shook his head, all honest about it; not knowing how much he had been missing out in life by not having that simple knowledge.

A mother… someone who, unlike Hojo, would care for him and keep him away from those things that caused him so much pain. Someone who had put him in that world and could tell him where he’d come from.

But who would that even be…?

* * *

They didn’t quite know where that plan would lead in the end, only that after a while Sephiroth felt Aerith couldn’t stay there without eventually learning the true reality of the labs, the hard way. And because of his own, restless curiosity and lack of what else to do, he knew the schedules of most of the people who worked down there.

He wasn’t putting so much faith in the possibility of any of it working, but not only did that woman — Aerith’s mother — say that it would be alright, she also offered to take him along, for reasons he didn’t fully understand but chose to accept regardless.

And that was how they found themselves going through corridor after corridor, with Sephiroth knocking out those who stood in the way under a sad look he didn’t quite understand, either. (Wasn’t he doing a good job making sure they wouldn’t be caught? Then, why…?)

It was only by the end of it, near the exit, that he understood something. He let go of the adult’s hand he was holding and let himself fall back to distract the oncoming guards as those two escaped, reluctantly, Aerith reaching her hand out in vain over her mother’s shoulder while calling out for him.

Without him, they’d be lost in the crowd rather easily and be able to find their way around without all those protocols he needed, even when they had no combat skills under their names.

In the end, it was all about something he couldn’t name that they still had to them in some degree and that he no longer had, something that earned him sad looks for it. And he wasn’t meaning to ruin any of it for them.

Maybe he just wasn’t meant to meet another kid like he had.


	2. Wish

Out there, the world seemed to breathe him in, instead of the other way around. It was suffocating in a vastly different way from the over excessive cleanliness of the labs; the blinding white and the constant monitoring. It emanated so much dirty, blood, rot with a hint of sword oil and overall exhaustion. And deep down, Sephiroth knew he wasn’t supposed to be there just then. He was trained for combat, yes, but the war was something he hadn’t been prepared for; didn’t have time to get any of the needed preparation, in fact.

But that was his own fault that they sent him there like that.

They each had their own excuses for it. Hojo called it an evaluation, always interested in science over people, even when angry for losing a “valuable sample”. The president himself judged him on the basis that if he was ready to waste company resources, (which Aerith was not, but Sephiroth wouldn’t dare correct those people) then he was ready to perform outside.

Outside, where the sky had all those stars Gast once told him about but could never have prepared him for the way they shone. Where people didn’t use protocols for about every single thing like they did back in the labs.

Outside… where Hojo couldn’t quite reach him.

* * *

The war grew on him faster than it should have, despite all he knew from facing it.

He thought of Aerith once or twice, wondering whether she’d be living somewhere else in the world outside of Shinra by then or if they’d somehow managed to drag her and her mother back in. But a year went by, and then another and so on, and she eventually became a memory he could vaguely remember so well as he once had. Just a fragile, little figure with big, bright eyes who shouldn’t be in that place to begin with.

Some of his service in Wutai had forced him to kill at least a dozen of those, anyway. So after some time, Sephiroth just started telling himself that she wasn’t special. She just knew a bunch of things he didn’t because of the outside influence of her mother. The kids in Wutai knew how to throw grenades and shurikens at him because they were taught by their mothers and elders as well. It didn’t matter.

It never mattered.

His mother was dead, anyway. Gone when she put him in that world, as Hojo had told him clear as day. He could learn her name but that was it.

It would do him no favors to wish for her or have any wild desires of his own.

He was only there to obey.

* * *

The war came and went, and with it so did the two people who insisted on befriending him a few years before.

And the war, in the end, left behind someone called Zack Fair. Zack, who wasn’t fragile but who had those big, bright eyes and an insistence on befriending everybody he met. Which sometimes also involved flirting with the women on the way.

Until he somehow found Aerith and made it his mission to let at least half of the company know that they were dating.

It should be just a coincidence, just a trivial detail, but for the first time in years it had Sephiroth wondering about and wishing for a different life, in a different place far away from everything.


	3. Fate

The thing was that he just was never meant to meet her ever again, whether it was for an attempt at friendship or from a distance, to check how she was doing.

And disturbed as he was with the entire Genesis and Angeal situation and how it related to him, it didn’t help his case at all.

They assigned him to a mission at Nibelheim and he went, to at least keep his mind occupied, if anything. He made sure his men were well, while trying to ignore the worries deep in his head. He tried to make small talk with one of the infantrymen, but who was he trying to fool, anyway?

Sephiroth had expected to leave Shinra after that one mission, but fate had a few ideas for how that should go that greatly differed from all that he had imagined.

In the end, it was fair. He was too famous to just disappear from the public eye and start a different, peaceful life elsewhere. He was way too tied up by the chains put on him by the world to escape.

He was at a position where there was only one way out.

And maybe, just maybe, he was always meant to fall.

* * *

All it took was Cloud Strife to make him remember that his unspoken mission in life was to destroy Aerith, try to take the world down and be destroyed himself.

It didn’t matter that he remembered when he had already gone through it and when all he could do then was to stay in his corner of the lifestream, dyeing it black with resentment, though.

Until a certain someone came by with a sigh and the smell of fresh flowers.

“Gaia, what should I even do with you? You forgot all about it again…”

“You talk as if you remembered, yourself,” Sephiroth replied, refusing to look at her, “If you’ll blame me, why didn’t you do anything to change it?”

“I did. But you decided to be a hero and stay behind instead of fleeing with me and mom. Idiot.”

“That’s not the only point in my life where things could’ve changed and you know it.”

Aerith snorted.

“Oh, please. What were you expecting? That I was gonna barge into Shinra and be your knight in shining armor?”

“Of course not. But at least saying ‘Oh hey, you should come along because I can see your fate and it’s not very good’ would’ve been helpful.”

“Hm, maybe I’ll consider it for next time. Now, enough moping… let’s go, Mr. Hero. Time to do it again.”

Very reluctantly, Sephiroth stood, already knowing that things would more or less have the same result once more.


	4. In the Wild (Free Day)

The part of Sephiroth that knew was expecting to wake up in the labs again, as a child without any remembrance of that afterlife meeting and ready to tackle life in almost the same way as before, having any semblance of innocence destroyed, wishing for things he couldn’t have and losing himself to his fate.

But the usual chemical smells were gone from his surroundings, replaced by that of general wilderness.

(A forest...? But Gaia had few of those. Maybe a simulation?)

The most pressing issue though was that, for once, he remembered everything. Just for once he had his sins already there to plague him. And weirdly enough, he had returned already an adult.

Full fledged, with all of Jenova’s abilities, too, somehow.

Stretching out a sole wing, he took to the skies, longing to figure out more about his surroundings.

In the far distance, away from what seemed to be a settlement, Midgar stood.

Once the most powerful place in the world, now it was taken back by nature.

* * *

_What had Aerith done this time?_ He wondered over and over.

Was that the future? If so, had people started caring better for the Planet? How far into the future was it? Did people still remember him? The questions refused to leave him in peace. Maybe he should seek out some form of civilization and see. Even if he wasn’t wearing his usual clothes, — dressed in dark robes that reminded him of the clothing people used in Wutai — if people were to remember him, they’d recognize him anyway by the hair alone.

And well, he could get there rather fast by air.

Except…

In the forests below, someone screamed. It sounded like a little kid.

Moving downwards, he made quick work of the wild beasts threatening the kid before taking a good look at her; a little figure with big, bright eyes. Green; but unlike his. Green eyes, chestnut hair and pink clothes. But still a kid, unlike him.

They stared at each other for a very long while before she started to cry and ran to hug his leg, thanking him — a kind stranger — for the help, because she was young and couldn’t handle her fire materia well, or any fighting for that matter.

She didn’t remember.

And just for once, there he was, in a different life, in a place that had changed so much compared to everything he once knew that he could as well call it a different place altogether.

He had yet to know whether that was a blessing or a curse.


	5. Shapeshifter

Cloud was many things, but he wasn't an idiot. At least, not most of the time.

The locals mentioned a haunting and he immediately knew it was probably some lost, mako high monster roaming about. They mentioned zombies, he'd find a violent sleep walker during the night. Some of them gossiped rumors about the mayor and he already knew that the man in question was cheating on his wife.

He had become a little difficult to fool and rather sharp over the years, after all.

A thousand years.

He'd kept himself alert ever since that time, when he fought Sephiroth deep down in the Crater and was left with the silent promise of more echoing in his mind; a threat etched in his thoughts.

His friends, aside from Vincent, passed away, one by one. He witnessed Nanaki's kind multiply to the point they could be found all over the world now. Gaia had relaxed and healed enough that the fields were taken by wild flowers, forests had expanded and part of the Northern Continent began to warm up a little more during the summers. He saw the last Shinra perish, become history and be forgotten altogether, and he had forgiven himself. He’d been forgotten, himself, as nobody else in the world talked of the Hero who vanquished the Silver Demon of Wutai, anymore.

A thousand years spent in constant foreboding.

That was how, when he heard of the great silver wolf roaming around the nearby woods with a little girl in pink, he sort of knew who it was.

He knew, but he didn’t want to confirm that hypothesis for either of the two.

Expecting Sephiroth’s return was already bad enough. Cloud didn’t need him to possibly be wandering about with what seemed to be Aerith of all people.

And yet, there he was, roaming the woods himself until he caught sight of them; the silver wolf turning into a white cat and climbing the tree quite fast to toss fruits to the soft ground below.

He meowed and turned into a squirrel to climb his way down, before turning again to help the girl pick up the fruits, now looking like Cloud’s old enemy and leaving no doubts about who he was.

That was when Cloud chose to step in and demand answers out of him. What was he doing with that girl, for starters?

* * *

Sephiroth heard him before he saw him, quickly stepping in front of Aerith to protect her from what he supposed at first to be a random beast, then a random civilian, before he recognized that voice.

But he hadn’t burned anything this time and wasn’t trying to summon anything, either.

He supposed the scars of all he had done had lingered, then. There was no other explanation for it. Regardless, Aerith began crying behind him, scared of the loud stranger shouting questions and appearing vaguely threatening.

Funny how Cloud had turned into some sort of villainous figure and reversed their roles, even if it was for a brief moment until Sephiroth paid him no mind and turned to attend to the kid under his care, who knew nothing of villages razed to the ground or of threats in the sky. Or of Reunion, for that matter.

“You’re scaring her,” he said, as firm as he could. _ Leave us be _ was left hanging in the silence that followed.

* * *

Hours later, he found himself sitting on the edge of a bed in an inn, watching that child sleep peacefully. Surely, the inn beds seemed somehow worse than back in his days of Shinra, but a kid wouldn’t know any better. Especially a kid who had taken to sleep basically anywhere.

Cloud hadn’t left them be, but had agreed to a brief truce, though. With Aerith asleep, however, it was clear he would no longer hold back the questions he had first shouted at him back there. He craved the answers and waited for as long as it took for the reason of their truce to have no way to interfere in their affairs.

“Done?” He asked Sephiroth quietly.

“Yes. We have a few hours.”

“Good, let’s go outside, then.”


	6. Darkness

It was odd to discuss matters with someone whose hometown he had burned down to the ground, yet there he was.

On top of everything, that was a test and he knew it. Cloud wouldn’t have taken his weapon along if it wasn’t. But still, something about the setting had him wishing it wasn’t a test, but rather a catch up to everything he had missed in… a whole thousand years, as Cloud had half informed, half cursed at him.

Nibelheim had burned down again about a hundred years before his return, for reasons unrelated to Sephiroth himself. They had just recently rebranded the town and, by extension, the region as Niflheim, though outsiders had come to call the place “City of Wolves” as well, after the local wildlife of the area.

Cloud wanted nothing to do with it, though, it seemed.

He was more interested in staying in the Eastern Continent, fighting monsters at night and being a delivery man during the day.

(And keeping his blond hair long and in a distracting ponytail, too.)

The bigger reactors were there, after all. And though they were long since deactivated and rotting away, they could still leak and cause weird events. Such as corpses being reanimated and trying to find their way home, just like in one of those movies Zack once liked to brag about watching, destroying anything alive in their path.

It was a test. It was a test and Sephiroth didn’t want to say that it could be a good idea to find any way to control some of the corpses to fight the others.

Instead, he offered, “Do you need any help with it?”

* * *

Not only he offered his help, Sephiroth also offered his own point of view of everything he had been through since their last battle. All of the loops of losing his way and trying to end everything without ever remembering until the end. The time caring for that child in the woods.

Cloud touched his forehead in search for a fever that wasn’t there before believing him. Before finally deeming him non-threatening enough that their truce should continue. Before theorizing that maybe, Aerith had offered her memories of those events to end the cycle.

That maybe, Sephiroth had been stuck in it for a thousand years.

They had gone back to the inn to find that Aerith had woken up at some point and had waited anxiously for Sephiroth to return.

Which, for Cloud of all people, sounded like the weirdest concept. But he decided not to question it much.

* * *

Having another person fighting the anomalies of the night alongside him made Cloud’s work easier. And with time, it became equally easier to forget Sephiroth’s past wrongdoings. Or rather, not quite forget, not quite forgive, but accept that dark stain for what it was and try to work things out.

Slowly.

A routine of watching him being a decent enough person every day and doing what he could to provide for that kid. Of witnessing him taking blows that weren’t meant for him at all and refusing to handle any kind of fire in Cloud’s presence.

Any kind of hero worship had died a thousand years before, so Cloud knew it wasn’t quite that when it all started. It wasn’t simple thankfulness for having someone help, either. It was… Cloud didn’t quite know what it really was.

Until the day when…

“I… I don’t think I can see,” Sephiroth mentioned after a harsh battle, one where he jumped in front of Cloud in the last moment to take the hit in his place. “Do you have…?”

“No, we have to either go back to town or wait it out.”

He watched as Sephiroth pulled out a piece of cloth from his pocket to wipe his eyes with before bandaging them to prevent any further enemy damage there. Everything in his stance screamed he’d rather stay until the work was done. Cloud took note of that determination of his while staring at him adoringly, even if Sephiroth couldn’t see it.

“Let’s head back,” Cloud said, just as he finally realized what had been slowly worming its way inside him. He touched Sephiroth’s arm and took hold of his wrist before standing on his tiptoes to kill any sort of protests with a kiss. “Let’s go back to town,” he said again, this time just a whisper, as he longed not to ruin any possible good that took place there.

In that darkness, before they could take any step to return, Sephiroth sought out his lips once more.


	7. Remake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for making it with me to the end! And if you're here from having joined the SephirothWeek event in any way this year, thank you very much for that, too!
> 
> That said, I'm leaving this 'verse open for remixes and expansions in case anyone likes it enough to do that! I hope you have fun in case you do it!

She ran to the flower patch and not even a second later, her knees were against the soft ground as she looked for flowers to bring home.

Cloud had been right. Taking her to the ruins of the old church, after the monster issues had settled for the time being, had been a good idea in the end. Though, it also came with the realization that a year and a half after his return, Aerith had grown quite a lot.

It was strange to think that she’d age and return to the Planet while Sephiroth would remain as he was, rejected by time and death itself. Sure, he had Cloud to keep him company whenever that time came but, still…

“She grows too fast,” Sephiroth mumbled to himself, but it was enough for Cloud to hear him as well.

“She won’t grow taller than you,” he joked.

“I know. It’s not that, it’s just… I think being stuck in a loop where I always see her at the end for so long and now being here… I think it did something to me. I… Look at her, Cloud. Someday, we’re going to lose her.”

“I’ve been there once,” Cloud sighed.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s… fine. It was too long ago. And she’s back, isn’t she? Even though, it’s not the Aerith I knew.” He laughed. “Aerith remade herself and made you into a family man, didn’t she?”

“I guess? It’s strange. Back then, when I thought of having a family, it was always about a mother, not about…”

“Being a dad to the girl you always kill?”

Sephiroth nodded awkwardly. It was the truth, but he didn’t like thinking about that in such a way. It only served to keep him up later than he should at night, trying to come to terms with everything wrong that happened that was attributed to his name.

“And dating the one who kills me,” he offered, if only to give Cloud the same kind of unease.

It worked for a few seconds only, before he was hit by the spell of that smile and the kind of behavior he expected from Cloud and Cloud only.

“Well, if someday I have to kill you again… I might as well enjoy myself while I can, right?”

Sephiroth pulled on that blond ponytail. Not hard enough to hurt, of course. Just enough to get that absurd grin out of his face a bit and get Cloud distracted enough that he’d gasp into the brief kiss he gave him.

“You’re incorrigible,” Sephiroth whispered, after they parted for air.

“And whose fault is that again?”

Cloud asked but got no reply, as Aerith ran back with as many flowers of as many kinds as she could get, causing Sephiroth to crouch down to her level, to free her of the effort of carrying those. She might’ve grown a little, but she was still very small. Or maybe it was just him and his towering height.

“Let’s go home and let’s make a beautiful garden,” he told her.

Remaking his life after everything had been a mix of all happening at once and all happening too slowly, but at least for the time being, he knew things were going to be alright.


End file.
